The Microbacterial Mambo
by The USS Ficcelsior
Summary: Jill deals with survival horror problems.


" _Death is but a doorway. Time is but a window. I'll be back."_

\- Superman

* * *

Jill heard the wet growls before the slow lurching footsteps. She turned around to see the towering Nemesis standing at the end of the alley. Every time she thought she had thrown the grotesque _thing_ off her scent, he would always come back with a vengeance when she least expected it. He had somehow followed her into every remote corner of Raccoon City no matter where she tried to hide, chasing her everywhere like a relentless genetically-programmed machine.

And now she was stuck. She was in a dead end somewhere in the city's old apartment district. Behind her, a solid brick wall looming five floors above her head. To her left, more bricks with some metal trash containers lined up against them. There were windows on this side, but nothing in her reach even with some fancy acrobatics. To her right, there was a rusty and unreliable-looking fire escape that went all the way up to the roof. It might be an option if she was speedy about it. Or Nemesis might just pull the whole thing off its shaky supports when she was halfway up and turn her into a concrete pancake on the way back down.

The creature's shadow filled the entire width of the alley, but his hulking trench coat-clad mass left plenty of small gaps between his shoulders and the walls. Jill would have to squirm her way out of this one.

Nemesis crept into the alley, hissing the name " _STARS…_ " through decomposing teeth. Jill jogged forward ready to break out her close-quarters training. They met somewhere in the middle.

Jill threw a punch, and Nemesis simply absorbed it. Nemesis swung his arms down like he was the axeman and she was Anne Boleyn. Jill narrowly missed her haircut appointment and responded with a roundhouse. Nemesis tilted sideways and crashed into the trash bins.

Jill's eyes began to sting as the sweat dripped from her forehead. She pulled her pistol from her hip and a fresh clip from the jacket tied around her waist. She locked the cartridge in place and aimed with shaky arms while Nemesis was lifting himself out of empty cat food cans and last week's ravioli. Her courage was struggling to bring itself completely together, but a single round between the eyes was all she needed to stagger him long enough to open an escape route.

* * *

Hundreds of miles away, in a command bunker that Jill (or anyone else, for that matter) knew nothing about, Umbrella was watching. A line of mobile tacticians were huddled in front of a large screen. Albert Wesker stood up behind the row, eyes hiding under shades and arms militantly crossed behind his back.

The feature presentation playing on the screen was one Valentine, Jill trying to fight her way out of a narrow apartment block. Recorded through Nemesis' cloudy and all-red retinal vision, she appeared as a collection of glowing curved pixels that could easily be picked out from the straight and flat background lines. The workers watched as she threw a punch at the lens to get out of a tight jam. When that didn't work, she spun into a spinning kick. The camera flickered in static and flew out of control after the impact.

"She's going to slip past him again. I'll send him back into Tracker Mode," said one of the workers. Wesker raised his hand in rejection.

"No. Her fatigue is finally catching up to her."

His eyes watched every chemical impulse the cameras sent back with obsessive detail. His mind processed the hundreds of variables being detected through Nemesis' biosensors with brilliant efficiency. It took him only a second to glimpse Jill's mental and physical condition through his sunglasses.

"Look at the readouts. Her endorphins are exhausted. Her stress levels are throwing off her reactions just slightly. Chronic exhaustion is starting to set in. This is the most unsteady she's been after 12 encounters."

He lowered his voice in cold certainty.

"We're staying in this one. We may have finally caught our little rabbit."

"Why are we trying to catch her?" a worker asked. "I thought the point of the Nemesis program was to kill off all the STARS Members."

"Eliminating the STARS _Alpha_ members is only one of his functions. That's just a test of his combat readiness," Wesker said. "His other purpose is to quarantine the surviving STARS Bravo personnel for further study. They hold better genetic value due to their initial exposure at the Arklay site."

"Isn't she Alpha Team?"

"Yes, but the top Bravo candidate for our T-Cleopatra weapon, a certain Ms. Chambers, has made herself unavailable as of late," Wesker explained. "This one fits the all the desired traits as a substitute."

He pointed to the hourglass of red pixels representing Jill in the video crosshairs.

* * *

Jill fired the first bullet, and Nemesis didn't flinch. She fired again and again as he slogged closer. She started firing wildly as she backed up, all the way until her spine brushed against solid brick. She frantically kept squeezing the trigger even when the gun only made empty clicking noises. Nemesis was so close that she could feel his breath washing over her in smoldering fumes.

Jill rebounded from the wall and went for another kick. This time Nemesis blocked her by hooking his right arm under her thigh and backing her up straight into the bricks. With her leg still tangled, he reached out with his left hand and grasped her neck. He unhooked his right arm and dragged her up the wall with only his left hand.

Jill's legs flailed as they looked for ground. She gagged through her breaths as the creature's mangled fingers paid a close visit to her jugulars. She dropped her gun and clawed at the enormous fist locked around her neck with both hands.

Nemesis opened his empty right hand. A two-inch appendage grossly resembling a snake slithered out from a rotted cavity in his palm, waving in Jill's general direction. Slowly and methodically, Nemesis hovered his mutating palm over the left side of her chest.

Nemesis wound his arm back. Jill gasped in the split second before her fate came swinging forward. The stinger stabbed through her heart like a pulsating organic syringe.

Jill thought death was when you felt your blood turning ice cold, but instead she started growing feverishly hot. The healthy pink luster in her skin turned sickly pale lavender. Her eyes shrank into tiny panicking dots. She felt something like iron rebar scraping against her stomach and heard fabric rip. Her tube top split almost completely in half—leaving her left side essentially topless—as the ribs closest to her heart protruded her skin and molded into jagged organic armor.

She lifted her left hand to her terrified eyes and watched as the fingers melded into a three-pointed flipper before elongating into serrated claws. Her skirt tore as her hips put on an extra two inches and tried to escape their confines. Her legs became like firm and lean missiles as her blood-iron levels turned as dense as solid metal.

Rapid horrific changes were followed by abrupt hibernation. Jill's face froze in a look of terror as her pores began to weep. Her body exuded mutating proteins and enzymes that blanketed her in slime and quickly thickened into a protective shroud. When Nemesis finally drew his hand away from her neck, Jill's chrysalis was strong and sticky enough to hold her entire weight up on the wall.

The oozing bacterial sheath had a pale yellowish hue and wrapped around the sleeping organism like damp cellophane. A Jill-shaped cocoon sandwiched between two brick walls.

* * *

The cameras slowly panned over the specimen's enfungused chest and sniffed her faint heartbeat. The view rotated to the entrance of the alley and slowly moved toward the next objective. Heavily armed field personnel could already be heard coming out of the surrounding buildings and scrambling into the narrow passageway while Nemesis was leaving.

Wesker nodded with satisfaction at the screen.

"Clock the time for successful pathogen bonding. Alert the field team T-Cleopatra is ready to be removed from the premises. I want the livestock tagged and in her freezer at Home Base by oh-five-hundred. Get blood samples in 15 minute intervals so we can log the changes in transport. Monitor the infection site for any abnormal necrosis. And for God's sake, be careful with that dorsal pincher."

* * *

 _Author's note: I wonder if they're ever going to make a RE game with a Game Over screen that says "YOU HAVE LEFT THE HUMAN GENOME." I think there's some Metroid Prime games that do something like that.  
_


End file.
